Luke Tallon, Senior Executive Director of Maryland Genomics, is a molecular biologist and bioinformatician with more than 25 years of experience leading and managing genomics projects and laboratories. Mr. Tallon is the Associate Director for Core Services at the Institute for Genome Sciences and a member of faculty in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Over the last 25+ years, he has developed expertise in high-throughput sequencing technologies, bioinformatics, and genomic analysis and has more than 95 publications in these areas. He leads laboratory and computational teams responsible for implementation and operation of high-throughput ‘omics platforms, including multiple generations of Illumina, Pacific Biosciences, and Oxford Nanopore sequencers, single-cell and spatial biology platforms, our Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS), sequence data processing and quality control, and bioinformatics analysis services including genome assembly, sequence variant detection and annotation, transcriptome/expression analysis, and metagenome/metatranscriptome analysis. As the Senior Executive Director of Maryland Genomics, Mr. Tallon is responsible for all research and clinical operations and platforms, technology development, financial oversight, and project & customer success. He also provides scientific guidance to researchers on the application of each sequencing platform and analysis of resulting data, and leads our project consultations with new clients.

Ramaswamy Iyer, Ph.D., D(ABMGG), FACMG, Director, Clinical Genomics has 20+ years of experience leading CAP/CLIA-certified clinical diagnostic laboratories. Dr. Iyer is the Associate Director for Clinical Genomics at the Institute for Genome Sciences, and Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. He directs the Maryland Genomics Translational Diagnostics Laboratory (MGTDL), a clinical genomics laboratory that develops and implements validated assays supporting delivery of high-quality patient care, as well as basic and clinical research activities. Dr. Iyer brings broad and deep scientific, clinical/diagnostic expertise, and operational management experience in academic, government, and industrial settings. Significant previous positions held by Dr. Iyer include (a) VP, IGL, Research Lab and Biobanks at the Inova Translational Medicine Institute (ITMI), where, as a founding member of ITMI, he operationalized a comprehensive CAP/CLIA-certified core service that provided genomic and biobanking services for research, clinical trials, and patient care, serving internal and external/commercial clients; (b) (One of the) Program Manager for the ‘The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA)’ program at the National Cancer Institute coordinating centralized biorepositories that provided high-quality analytes for cancer genome sequencing; (c) Founding Director of an esoteric genetic testing laboratory and an institute-wide biobank at the University of Michigan. Dr. Iyer has also directed clinical laboratories at UCLA, Myriad Genetics, and Nationwide (previously Columbus) Children’s Hospital. Dr. Iyer was trained in Clinical Molecular Genetics and Clinical Cytogenetics at UCLA-Cedar Sinai in Los Angeles. He is board-certified by the American Board of Medical Genetics (ABMG) in Clinical Molecular Genetics and is a fellow of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics (ACMG).

Lisa DeShong Sadzewicz, PhD, Administrative Director joined the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1995 and the Institute for Genome Sciences in 2008. She has more than 25 years of experience in laboratory management and high-throughput operations. Dr. Sadzewicz is responsible for project and financial management, including budgeting, invoicing, scheduling and monitoring projects. She oversees the day-to-day laboratory operations and personnel. Dr. Sadzewicz has extensive large-scale project management experience and coordinates all Maryland Genomics projects to ensure smooth transitions at each phase of the project, including sample receipt, quality control, sample preparation, sequencing, analysis, and data delivery to our clients.

Mike joined the Institute for Genome Sciences and the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 2011. He is a molecular microbiologist with more than 15 years of experience in the application of genomics and next generation sequencing approaches in the fields of microbiome, public health, environmental sciences, and clinical diagnostics. With Dr. Jacques Ravel, Mike established the Microbiome Services Laboratory, a microbiome-focused core resource which is now a component of Maryland Genomics and routinely processes >50,000 samples annually for characterization by amplicon, metagenome, metatranscriptome, and genome sequencing. Mike serves as the Technical Director for Maryland Genomics where he’s responsible for laboratory R&D, new assay development, automation systems, and technical and laboratory workflows for the many projects within our research and clinical diagnostics portfolio.

Anup Mahurkar, CIO is the Chief Information Officer and the Director of the Informatics Resource Center at IGS. He has extensive experience in the field of genomics and health sciences where he has worked as a researcher, engineer, and manager over the past 30 years. During this time, he has overseen the work of scientists, engineers, system administrators, and managers in research environments. His areas of expertise include genome analysis, web-based analysis and visualization tool development, building scalable analysis systems, database design, and high-throughput computing architecture and application development. He leads a team of more than 25 researchers, engineers, analysts, and IT professionals responsible for production bioinformatics activities, custom bioinformatics analysis, new tool development, and systems engineering. His group also develops visualization tools including Manatee, Circelator, Probing Outcomes Data with Visual Analytics (POD-Vis), and Gene Expression Analysis Resource (gEAR). Over the past 15 years his group has analyzed thousands of ‘omics data sets. This work has led to over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals from the group.